Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

What did she say?

I can’t picture my sister’s face, anymore. I don’t know what she said. I don’t remember our mother’s name, only the stick of her wrist as she hugged me goodbye. I remember Onalenna’s last words to me: Don’t look back, Moremi. I’ll miss you, but….

But what?

I think I remember her voice. I think I remember it cracking. But I don’t remember my sister.

I don’t remember what I said when I got Captain Hao alone. Just the feeling of blood pounding in my ears. I felt sick, but I had to say it, or be like Mesfin forever.

She stared at me. Not a caught-in-the-act stare. Not a repentant stare. She stared like she’d never believed an African cleaning lady could be so stupid.

“Dr. Maele.” Her voice was ice. “Can’t you read? ”

I’d pictured her screaming, attacking me in a blood-writing homicidal haze. This was worse.

“Not Mandarin,” I said helplessly, my eyes frozen to hers. “Not very much of it. I can speak Mandarin and read English and, for a non-Chinese citizen, that was enough for—”

“I know the personnel requirements of my own ship, Moremi. Fine. Since you’re so concerned, let me educate you. The words I’ve been writing on the walls? They say, Keep out. ”

I stared.

Captain Hao clasped her gloved hands and spoke the way you’d talk to a brain-damaged 12-year-old. “The stars speak to me most of all, as is fitting. They wish to use me, and my ship, for their own ends. I will not let them. They understand blood more than anything else. So, I use blood to let them know they are unwelcome. Haven’t you noticed that, when I do this, the voices lessen, if only for a while? Or does the University of Johannesburg give doctorates to those who don’t understand covariation?”

I was frozen down to my belly. She was right, and I hadn’t noticed.

We will use you, said the stars. We will use her. Soon, you will see.

“Captain?” I said. “What do the stars say to you?”

She pointed. “Out.”

Call me a coward, but I left.

I stewed all evening and all morning, all through my cleaning time. I couldn’t calm down. When the Harmony I was spotless, I collapsed into Henri’s bed.

He didn’t seem surprised. “Your little panic attack is over, then?” I was past caring. With him, at least, I could stop thinking for a minute.

The voices slithered into my ears. I kissed him and kissed him. He pinned me against the cabin wall. His skin grew hot with surface blood. The voices sang. I didn’t care.

Kisses. Blood. The stars. Captain Hao. Blood. I was past thinking. I still saw them.

Henri was already inside me when the voices coalesced into words. Too loud to ignore, not even there and then. So loud they drowned out Henri’s moans.

He is ours. His blood, his life, they are ours. You will give him to us.

For a split second, I could see it: His limbs splayed, his eyes glassy, red everywhere. The stars laughing.

My stomach turned to ice. The vision, and the voices, went away. He was alive and moving, kissing me, cursing in French. Should I have told him to stop? Should I have pushed him off of me?

He took a few minutes of afterglow before he realised I still wasn’t moving. “Love? Are you all right?”

I managed to make my mouth work. “I think so.”

“Come here.”

I sat on the cot beside him and he wrapped me in his arms. They were not comforting.

“It’s the voices, oui? ”

“ Ee, ” I agreed. He knew as many words of Tswana, by now, as I did of French.

“Poor thing. They speak to me, too, you know.”

It was the sort of inane thing Henri would say. Did he think there was anyone who didn’t hear them? But, out of some perverse impulse, I asked, “What do they say?”

“They say that I am not worthy of them. That I must die and my blood will consecrate the ship.” His fingers tightened in my hair. “But it is foolishness. I have never been suicidal, even out here, and I find them easy to ignore. If they want me to kill myself, they will have to try harder, hmm? So, what do they tell you?”

I was silent.

“Poor little Moremi. Don’t think of the stars. Think of home. Old lovers, drinking companions, colleagues, that sister you love so much. Remember we are doing this for them.”

I thought of them. Or I tried to.

I could not think of anything. At first, I thought I was still paralysed from the vision. But I could think of Henri, Captain Hao, Mesfin, Suardana, all the rest of them.

I could not think of my sister. Nor my parents. Nor anyone on Earth I had ever known. I could not remember my alma mater, my hometown, my religion—if I had one. I could not remember veldts or rivers or cities. And I had not even noticed them go.

“Did I have a sister?”

“Of course you did. You always used to talk about her. Her name was…Oh, let me see…It’s coming to me….”

He trailed off and went very pale. We looked in each other’s eyes for a moment. Then he put a hand to his forehead and began murmuring to himself in French, too low and too fast for me to make anything out.

I was in no shape to comfort him. I made an excuse and went back to my room. I read the scant lines in this notebook, over and over again. ‘Onalenna’—that was her name. But I only know it because it is written here. It does not ring a bell.

I think we are all going to die out here. I hope we will die.

How long has it been since I wrote in this notebook? A day? Five years?

It must have been a long time. Everything is in disarray. Wails and screams echo through the metal halls.

I remember nothing. I am not even completely sure that I am Moremi Maele. My only memory—recent? Or old?—is this:

I held a human heart in my hands.

Blood covered my fingers and stained my jumpsuit. I knelt and held the heart up to a woman, speaking words I no longer remember. She was cold and indescribably beautiful.

I remember a split second of revulsion on her face. And then a change, a sort of crumbling. In that moment, as I knelt before her, she gave in. She began to laugh. The stars laughed around us. I felt an odd, surging joy. We were theirs, now. Together, we had crossed the point of no return.

That is all I remember. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it is a real memory or a false vision. I don’t know for sure whose heart it was, though I think I know. Call me cowardly. I can’t bring myself to go look in his cabin. Instead, I sit with this notebook. Waiting, though I can’t say for what.

Is Henri dead?

Is Moremi Maele, in any sense, still alive?

Don Webbbegan writing in a class at Texas Tech University in 1983. Since then, he has had fifteen books in English and one book in German in his name. He teaches creative writing on-line at UCLA. His next two books are a nonfiction book, dark esoterica Uncle Setnakt’s Nightbook from Runa Raven Press, and a collection of vampire stories, A Velvet of Vampyres from Wildside Press.

THE FIRST TIME, it was necessary.

It was centuries ago, during the Belatrin Wars. We were on the scoutship Fulton . One of our robots was a Belatrin spy with cunningly faked asimovs. It smashed our hydroponics, our communications, our Dirac drive. Melting it to slag relieved little of our anxiety. Two days without food honed our anxiety to high sharpness. None of us had ever been hungry before. Hunger was an impersonal, historical, statistical thing—so many million in Ethiopia in the 20th century, in Brazil in the 21st, on Mars in the 25th. The personally-new phenomenon of hunger displaced the transpersonally-new phenomenon of civilisation very quickly.